STARTUPS CENTRAL

Solar is on track to be the single biggest source of electricity within the next decade, a new industry analysis finds, yet booming demand from artificial intelligence data centers and the electrification of heavy industry will keep gas and coal running for years to come. The consultancy argues the move toward sun-derived generation is being driven largely by economics: panel-mounted systems are now so inexpensive that utilities and developers choose them over thermal plants

Status AI, a start-up that uses generative models to let people step into fan-made universes, said Tuesday it raised $17 million in a combined seed and Series A round led by a group of well-known venture firms. Backers include Abstract, General Catalyst, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and LightShed Partners, which together are betting the next wave of social apps will look more like interactive entertainment than a never-ending feed. The app asks users to design a person

Stilta raised $10.5 million in a seed financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Y Combinator and executives from companies including OpenAI, Legora and Lovable. The Stockholm-based startup says its software helps businesses identify and analyze patents they’ve ignored for years, turning slow, expensive intellectual property reviews into a faster, cheaper process that in some cases can yield enforceable claims or licensing opportunities. The product l

Kyle Fraser and Kamilla Karthigesu, who formed a close alliance on the CBS reality series, are turning their partnership into a startup. The two announced Tuesday the launch of Paprclip, an app that pairs users to track progress on personal objectives through short video updates and collaborative tasks. The founders have opened a Kickstarter to raise an additional $40,000 to push the product through further development and early distribution. Fraser said his own post-show lif

Apple says the next set of accessibility upgrades, driven by its on-device intelligence, will let people with sensory and mobility challenges interact with Apple products in new ways — including steering compatible wheelchairs with eye movement. The company unveiled enhancements that sharpen image description in its screen reader, add conversational camera reading, and generate captions for personal videos across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Vision Pro. The maker of the iP

A wave of malicious updates hit widely used open-source projects this week after attackers gained access to a developer account and rapidly pushed corrupted releases, researchers reported. In about one-third of an hour the intruders distributed roughly 630 tainted versions across 317 packages, aiming to harvest login data and spread further downstream. The campaign targeted libraries that countless engineers include in applications, including a visualization toolkit maintaine

A security researcher says large numbers of plain-text login credentials and cloud access keys tied to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were posted in a public Git repository, potentially exposing federal systems. The credentials — described as login tokens, cloud access keys and other sensitive files — were discovered in spreadsheets that a contractor employee had uploaded, according to the researcher and subsequent reporting. Guillaume Valadon of securit

Google DeepMind has begun stitching Street View imagery into its Genie virtual-environment engine, allowing people to explore recognizable city blocks in an interactive simulation that can change weather, time and other conditions. Announced at the Google I/O developer conference, the feature is available to some Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. starting today, with a broader rollout planned in the coming weeks. For everyday users the change means more than dropping th

Google introduced Gemini 3.5 Flash on Tuesday at its annual I/O developer event, positioning the release as a move away from chat-focused assistants toward AI that plans, builds and carries out complex tasks with little human direction. The company says the new model can orchestrate software builds, oversee extended research projects and — in internal trials — assemble an entire operating system. Google made Flash the default in its Gemini app and enabled it in Search’s AI Mo

OpenAI says it will start embedding standard provenance tags and an invisible watermark on pictures it creates, and will offer a public checker that can read both signals. OpenAI announced Tuesday that it will begin marking images produced by its tools with a metadata tag based on the C2PA standard and add an unseen digital watermark developed with Google called SynthID. The company also showed a preview of a free verification service that can detect those markers, aimed at h

Google introduced a new voice-driven feature for Gmail at its I/O developer event Tuesday, bringing conversational access to messages so people can speak to their inbox instead of typing search terms. Called Gmail Live and powered by Google’s Gemini models, the tool will let subscribers ask natural-language questions about flights, appointments, rental details and other items buried in email. The company said the feature will appear for Google AI Ultra subscribers first, with